Join us as Thetford author Dean Whitlock reads from his new book, The Bell Cannon Affair! A gaslight thriller, The Bell Cannon Affair is a new novel for young adults and adults from the award-winning author of Finn’s Clock and The Arrow Rune. This event will take place in-person in the reading room of Latham Library and simultaneously on Zoom. We have limited space for the in-person event…please register by emailing librarians@thetfordlibrary.org. If you would like to attend via Zoom, please email for the link.

“Bad luck seems to follow Ewan Gilmore, a crewman on the steam liner Isle of Lewis. It’s a blot that makes him a pariah among the crew. Now, about to be left behind on the pier, he gets one last chance to prove himself – to masquerade as a passenger and serve as a secret bodyguard for a certain Professor Jakub Skovajsa and his gifted daughter, Tereza.

The Skovajsas are being deported under a cloud of suspicion and fear. Not even they know exactly what happened during he professor’s last experiment, but somehow it killed his wife, along with a squadron of soldiers, a general, two congressmen, and the secretary of War. Rumor has it the professor was working on a secret weapon that would end all wars, and still has a prototype hidden away.

As passions ride on board, the Isle of Lewis steams eastward into a maelstrom of stowaways, shysters, spies, death threats, traitorous allies, and a raging hurricane, with the mystery of the Bell Cannon at its eye.”